CAREER

With the rapidly growing demand of high performance computations, the traditional central processing unit (CPU)-based computing systems have been deployed with field programmable gate array (FPGA) components for hardware acceleration, such as in the emerging CPU-FPGA cloud systems. Despite the significant performance benefits, the CPU-FPGA architecture introduces new attack surfaces through the communications between the two heterogeneous components.

It has now become clear that blockchains represent much more than a financial innovation. There are innovative public or private blockchain solutions for supply chains, the "Internet of Things", and beyond. In our highly inter-connected world, it is inevitable that these solutions will soon have to interact with each other. Similar to the Internet today, this will eventually result in formation of a network of blockchains where transactions flow across disparate blockchains.

Modern mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables, are targets of an increasing number of security attacks. Moreover, according to Google, an increasing number of attacks on (Android-based) mobile devices are targeting the operating system kernel. For example, 44% of attacks in 2016 targeted the kernel versus 9% and 4% respectively in 2015 and 2014. Unfortunately, contemporary mobile operating systems are large, complex, and full of vulnerabilities; hence they fall victims to these attacks more often than not.

The privacy settings provided by people's computers and mobile devices are the primary means by which users engage in privacy management. The constant stream of privacy related scandals and controversies highlight the challenges people face in understanding and utilizing these privacy settings to achieve the levels of privacy they desire. This research aims to overcome these challenges by developing and testing techniques to enhance the people's experience with their privacy preference specifications.

Cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are growing in popularity. These cryptocurrencies offer the promise of increased efficiency and decreasing frictions in the financial system, such as international money transfer fees and costs associated with raising investment capital. Unfortunately, they are also misused as a payment mechanism for illicit activities such as extortion, drugs, human trafficking, and cybercrime. These illicit activities have likely diminished the reputation of these cryptocurrencies and facilitated large amounts of harm for entities and individual people.